


Season of the Witch

by purpjools



Category: Hazbin Hotel (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Human, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Angst and Fluff and Smut, Barebacking, Blasphemy, Breast Enlargement, Breeding Kink, Childhood Friends to Unholy Lovers, Consent is Sexy, Creampie, Day 2 & 3, Discussion of Sex Change, Drama, Exhibitionism, Felching, Human Angel Dust (Hazbin Hotel), Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Child Physical Abuse, Implied/Referenced Homophobia, Last Time Zone, M/M, Magic, Mating Bites, Mention of Racism, Mind Reading, Miscommunication, Mutual Pining, Past Relationship(s), Phantom Dicks, Piercings, Porn with Feelings, RadioDust Week, Ritualistic Sex, Slight Mention of Feminization, Southern Gothic Inspired, Triple Penetration, Witch Alastor (Hazbin Hotel), Witches, coven - Freeform, not sexual abuse
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-19
Updated: 2020-06-07
Packaged: 2021-03-02 18:27:30
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 11,128
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24271315
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/purpjools/pseuds/purpjools
Summary: Day 2 & 3 of RadioDust week:Crossover/Alternate Universe and Angst/ComfortDon’t clip your nails at night. Don’t point at tombstones. Don't whistle at night.Angel, foolishly, has never heeded the old warnings. He takes no stock in fairy tales or ghost stories.Why should he, when the truth is stranger than fiction?(This is a disjointed, Southern Gothicesque, love story, and the course of love never did run smooth)
Relationships: Alastor (Hazbin Hotel)/Original Male Character(s), Alastor/Angel Dust (Hazbin Hotel), Angel Dust (Hazbin Hotel)/Original Male Character(s)
Comments: 53
Kudos: 206





	1. Darling, There’s Nowhere to Hide

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sure everyone is aware, but I am incapable of writing smut without feelings.

Angel awakes to the smell of smoke and the taste of metallic tang.

Someone has pried his mouth open, weaving his tongue between fingers. He cries out, muffled, and pushes them out with the appendage, the jeweled end of his tongue ring jamming into flesh.

The fingers withdraw, and Angel glares up at the grinning face of his childhood friend.

* * *

They grew up in the same neighborhood together, closer than most but not as tightly wound as family. Angel’s mother always cautioned him about Alastor, and Angel, being a dutiful young son, tried to keep a decently sized berth around him.

At first.

The attempt was admirable, if futile. Alastor kept challenging it with unrelenting conviction.

It was almost as if Alastor had imprinted on Angel the minute they met far past the lighted path in the woods beyond his house and vice versa. Angel could never be rid of Alastor. He was just a part of him like the earthy scent that clung to his clothes, the lifelines embedded in his palms, the unorthodox sexuality that coursed through his veins.

It was rumored that Alastor and his kin were godless, pagan worshippers. He’s heard the hushed accusations of “heretic” and “witch” strewn about like entrails when alluding to them. Living on the border of the civilized world and the forest didn’t help their cause. The townsfolk reported strange music, held aloft by dead air, stilted howling, and low chanting on nights when even the crickets wouldn’t trill. Like most children past their adolescence, in that unwise liminal age when fear is nothing but an interesting concept, Angel ceased to believe in such tall tales.

As he neared his teenage years, he started to believe that the rumors may have been rooted in racism or xenophobia. Alastor’s mother is black and Choctaw, and his father from overseas, after all. Alastor had mentioned, during a sordid summer, that his father returned to France and forgot them ever since.

One of them is dead, and he’s positive it’s not his mother.

It scarcely matters because Alastor is alive, and his shadow cloaks Angel’s skin.

Now, Angel lives with the viewpoint of an adult. Adulthood is the time when everything has a chance to come around full circle. He starts believing again in the impossible. What Alastor is has nothing to do with race. It has nothing to do with anything rational and easily explained. It has null to do with scripture, and shouldn’t have any basis in reality.

In his mind’s eye, within the woods, long ago:

The wings of unseen crows beat in erratic discord. The air was thick, stifling, gelatinous. The woodland stretched beyond, unknowable, and beckoning.

Leaves individually drifted in meandering, spinning circles towards the forest floor.

Alastor’s arm brushed his, the slick sweat of his body balm to Angel’s soul, the soft graze of his arm hair cementing the shame inside his heart.

“Do you know what they call a group of crows,” he murmured lowly, like a secret.

Angel trained his eyes towards the tree line, simultaneously avoiding his eyes and searching for signs of danger. He couldn’t bear to look at Alastor, for reasons unbeknownst to him at the time.

(He’s well aware now, well aware)

“What,” he said. It was not a question.

“A murder,” Alastor breathed between the salt-lick taste of shared air.

How was it possible that Angel shivered in such a climate?

(He knows now, he knows)

He flinched when a finger trailed down his arm, leaving behind a path of gooseflesh. He shut his eyes tight, fighting down the sinful thoughts emerging from dark depths. Alastor hummed, and he felt it on his flesh.

“What do they call us?” Again, not a question.

Angel was at a loss for words and lost otherwise. He wouldn’t be given a chance to answer.

Angel will never forget those warm chapped lips against his until the day he dies. And even so, for a while thereafter.

(This is where it all begins, their neverending story)

He never does receive the answer to the not-question.

Angel had left, years later, for the city, and he wasn’t sure if Alastor has ever forgiven him for that.

Now he knows for certain.

“Oh, my. What innocence,” a voice coos from his right.

He’s surrounded. Some of them linger on the margins, while others crowd around the spectacle that is he and Alastor. Angel’s eyes have not adjusted to the dark yet, but from his vantage point, they all seem to be women.

Regardless, he can’t help or hold his tongue. “The fuck? Lady, I don’t know what you’re smokin’ but-”

“Silly boy. I’m not talking about your body. I’m talking about your soul.”

Alastor speaks next, and his voice is a hot line licking up his cock. Angel shifts shamefully.

“My dear, you don’t need to be a virgin to be a powerful conduit. Many times for women, the hymen merely stretches and doesn’t tear. Menstrual blood, however, is much more potent.”

Virginity, his mind hisses. You should know, Alastor.

 _You_ took it.

Alastor’s imaginary voice exudes a sense of persiflage.

_Can’t take what was freely given, dear._

Angel’s patience is wearing thin. His temper has always been surprisingly quick with Alastor.

“Okay. The fuck ya tellin’ me all of this for? Ya gonna turn me into a girl and fuck me before sacrificing me to your fuckin’ gods?”

The sacrilegious thought waltzes through his mind, and it’s not altogether unpleasant. Alastor’s voice is dark when he answers.

“Would you like that?”

Angel can’t help it; he is unbearably hard.

“Alas, no. I think you’re marvelous the way you are.”

The women pipe up, tittering liltingly like songbirds.

“Alastor, you do so covet your pretty things, don’t you?”

“He sure is pretty, just like the last one.”

Angel bristles at that statement, but Alastor’s voice swells with pride when he says, “Isn’t he, though?”

Against his better sense, Angel preens.

“Oh, Al. He’s not even that far gone, is he?’

“Don’t tell me you plan on corrupting him too?”

Alastor tilts his chin up with a slim finger. The light reflects off his glasses. His eyes are smoky and onyx in the dim.

“Plan? No,” he says and laughs, a deep rumbling. He begins to remove his clothes.

“We’re playing this by ear.”

* * *

There is a split second when everything seems normal, in these queer circumstances, but looks can be deceiving.

He’s propped up on his elbows, rooted to the ground in fear when the light from the burning effigies shifts and moves in patterns across Alastor’s face. He groans, a terrible, wicked sound, and a curious creaking noise reminiscent of wooden staircases and old joints effuse the air.

Then, a splintering crack, like the sound of branches breaking under the weight of hanging bodies.

Alastor’s antlers sprout outwards, etiolated at first, but growing stronger with each passing moment. His antlers branch out, resembling a canopy of calcareous bones reaching about a foot above his head. It’s a satanic crown of ivory, one he hasn’t seen in years. Angel forces down an electric shock of perverse desire.

He rakes his gaze down Alastor’s bared skin. Angel’s treated to the best sight of his life, again. He has never wanted anything so bad inside him, ever.

It’s still the most gorgeous cock he’s ever seen.

Alastor is both a man and a monster all at once. Angel is overwhelmingly aroused. The girlish whispers floating around them don’t help the situation one iota.

“Shh, dear one. Let him take you. I promise he’ll be worth it.”

“Let the stag mount you, darling. Let Alastor breed you.”

Again, he thinks, deliriously.

Angel tells himself he doesn’t want this, that he’s humiliated and not turned on in the least. It’s a litany of bullshit words that he repeats in his head to convince himself later, in the shelter of his apartment, that he didn’t inherently want it.

So it makes no sense when he goads, “Ain’t too impressed with deer dick, Al. Pretty sure I’ve had better.”

There are scandalized gasps, to be sure, but a fair smattering of giggles. A light, bell-like voice says, “Oh, this one’s feisty, Alastor. Well-suited for you.”

The combination of his sass and her honeyed observation springs him into action.

Alastor pounces on his supine body, caging him under his arms. Angel arches as his fever hot skin covers his own. He bites up Angel’s exposed column of throat, menacingly close to his ear.

“He’s perfect,” he whispers, for Angel’s benefit only. Alastor stops, then pauses, tilting his head like a curious animal. Angel is momentarily tilted off-axis by the dichotomy in behavior before he realizes his mistake.

Alastor strikes, serpentine, and sinks his teeth into the most sensitive area at the junction of Angel’s neck. Angel swoons. It’s the most painful, toe-curling bite Alastor has ever given him, which is a high bar onto itself. No other man comes close to touching his high pain threshold.

Angel is furiously hard and on the precipice of releasing in his briefs.

“Oh, that reminds me,” Alastor says, garbled, through the teeth embedded in Angel’s neck. He releases his hold. Hot wetness sluices down his neck and Angel smells pennies. Alastor tuts. He leans in and laps it up.

He does this all while tugging at the waistband of Angel’s briefs and bringing them down. Angel assists him, light-headed and drunk on pleasure. The sharpness of the sting fades with every rough swipe of Alastor’s tongue. He absently wonders how he tastes.

“Divine,” Alastor says without preamble.

Arching up, he slips his tongue between Angel’s parted lips. He flicks it against Angel’s tiny stud before he closes the gap.

(The stud that Alastor pierced, the stud that matches the one on Alastor’s right lobe)

Alastor is finally kissing Angel for the first time in years. Alastor, his childhood friend, the first boy he’s ever wanted, the peripheral witch-child beckoning him into the dark, the man cum monster that can flay him open as no one will ever come close to.

Angel has witnessed Alastor’s cruelty, his abject strength. He’s seen him rip the jawbone off a pig’s skull after they spent a late afternoon tracking it down. He was present when Alastor broke all of Ambrose’s fingers after he dared to lay a hand on the orphan girl whose name in Angel’s memory has been lost to time. Alastor can be barbarous, maligning, and vindictive.

Right now though, he’s sweet, deferential, and yielding. It’s not out of character, and that drives Angel insane.

Memories float upwards, rippling in his mind unbidden. They surface as a series of snapshots.

 _Snap_. Angel, fearful of another black eye from his father as a consequence of bad grades, confiding in Alastor.

 _Snap._ Angel, despite having not studied at all, receiving the highest grade in the class. Alastor, looking away at an angle that makes it impossible to see his face.

 _Snap._ Angel, kissing Alastor under the swaying boughs of the willow tree, right before they graduate and right after Alastor takes a job at the local radio station.

 _Snap._ No one, in their small-minded little town, noticing them, and they’re free to love each other, undisturbed, for a night.

(Alastor always made sure they were never caught. The small-town mentality still followed Angel from city to city, but he was able to outrun the ghosts. He credits all that to Alastor, Alastor who made sure that his only baggage was well, him)

The contradiction that is Alastor threatens to undo Angel and turn him mad.

On cue, the changeling administers another sharp bite, this time to his collarbone.

I missed you, Alastor doesn’t say. I missed you and I haven’t forgiven you for leaving.

Or maybe he does. Maybe he says it in the shifting of his weight, the nosing up his neck, the erotic sighs on his naked skin.

Angel answers with his own, but it gets lost in the traveling wind.

* * *

Alastor whispers what sounds like a spell because, in the next moment, Angel is pried open by invisible fingers, stretched open with what feels like lubricant. Alastor’s hands are occupied with his nipple and cock. He sucks and nibbles on the other bud until it’s aching and pink. Unless he grew more limbs within the last couple of seconds, Angel is fairly sure that he’s being prepped by magic.

The wet squelches add to his open shame, but Angel bears down all the same. His hips leave the ground and grind into Alastor’s as a well-aimed thrust discovers his prostate. The slipperiness of their cocks rutting against each other is bliss, enough so that Alastor wraps his arms around Angel’s waist to increase friction. His back bows beautifully as Alastor holds him up. The clever machinations spreading him open never cease as they stimulate his prostate, almost to the tipping point.

Alastor wickedly ends the spell right before he reaches climax. Angel whines, then snarls. He reaches out to Alastor to castigate him but finds himself flipped over in a show of supernatural strength.

The tendrils of magic knead into his ass and spread his cheeks, displaying himself fully. There’s an appreciative moan behind him, and many similar sentiments to the sides of him, but Angel is incandescent. He’s always been headstrong and bull-headed. Angel nurtures a bonfire hot temper that contrasts starkly with Alastor’s glancing, glacial one.

As far as he’s concerned, Alastor can go fuck himself.

He flips over, kicking out and landing a blow above Alastor’s knee. Alastor misses catching his foot by millimeters. He winces, then regroups with blazing eyes. Their audience titters with amusement and few good-natured japes rise out from the crowd.

“Oh, my. He’s so much livelier than the one prior.”

“Yes, Alastor, let’s not the collar the next one. This is much more entertaining.”

No, Angel thinks, rage and jealousy bleeding into his brain. No “next one”.

Only me.

Alastor grins then, all teeth.

“No,” Angel growls. “I want ya to look at me. I want ya to watch me as you fuck me.”

Alastor laughs inside his head.

 _As I recall, Anthony_ , he sing songs, _you left me first. You have no ledge to stand on._

Fuck you, he answers inwardly.

What he says out loud is: “I want ya to remember my face when this is all over. And know that this will always be the best fuckin’ cunt you’ll ever have in your life.”

Alastor smiles, wider and sly. He looks more than a little pleased at Angel’s gall. More titters scatter into the air. Alastor doesn’t appear to notice or care. He yanks him by his calves and shoves them to the side of his torso. Angel responds by hooking his ankles around Alastor’s back.

He croons, “I’m going to mount you now, little fawn.” He nibbles at Angel’s lobe before warning, “Last chance to run.”

Angel isn’t sure if this is some unspoken coven rule, this queer demarcation demanding consent, because Alastor has always insisted upon it, even as fumbling teenagers during their first time.

Alastor slithers into his conscious again.

 _Consent is much more fulfilling, dear heart_ , he says. _The art of persuasion is highly underrated. Much more captivating to witness voluntary surrender than through force._

 _Allow Eve to choose the apple herself_ , he hisses. _The ruin is accelerated that way._

Angel, torn between agreement and vexation, goes along with it and gifts his consent explicitly. Alastor rewards him by kissing him and worries his bottom lip with sharp teeth. He feels like sin reincarnated. Angel readies himself to follow him further into temptation and ruin.

Alastor, industrious as always, discovers the perfect angle to shove in the head of his cock. Even with copious amounts of prep, it still stings. Angel feels impossibly stretched out. His vision blurs. Alastor seems to catch on, cooing soothing sounds into his ear, while circling his hips so that just the tip moves inside him. He hisses another spell, and the sting vanishes.

Angel begs as consequence, and Alastor benevolently grants his wish.

Breath rushes out of him as he slides his cock all the way inside.

“Anthony,” he moans, and it’s too much. He hoists himself up as best as he can to clasp a hand around Alastor’s nape to bring him down. Angel kisses him like the first time. Angel kisses him as if it means forever. Alastor’s breathing is erratic like he’s forcing himself not to cry.

In the end, he doesn’t, but Angel holds him through the close call.

When he recovers, it’s with great aplomb. Alastor murmurs sibilantly again and Angel’s eyes water. His mouth is pried open again with what feels like another cock. It unceremoniously shoves inside. Another prods at his hole.

“Open up, darling,” Alastor says, coarsely, as Angel’s hole stretches to accommodate another phantom cock alongside Alastor’s.

His scream is muffled around the invasion in his mouth. His eyes roll back at the sensation of being impossibly stuffed without even the slightest wisp of pain. Angel’s prostate is brutally assaulted in the aftermath, and the pleasure builds exponentially as both slide together inside of him.

It’s mind-blowing, exotically primeval, and Angel thinks he can see the spires of the old church from here. Alastor desecrates him on the forest floor, ritualistic innards and petals scattered about, acrid blood and lilac twining in the nocturnal breeze.

This is a sacrifice. This is a sacrifice and as cliché as it is, Angel forgets himself for a brief second.

 _No_ , whispers Alastor, deep inside. _It’s not a sacrifice._

_It’s tribute._

* * *

“Oh, Alastor, isn’t that just cruel,” he hears from the sidelines.

“If only he were as cruel to me,” a voice breathes out.

Angel fights down envy but preens with covetous delight as Alastor focuses solely on him.

My demon, he thinks as Alastor fucks into him, claiming his body. My monster.

Reading his mind, Alastor moans. His eyes grow darker and he says, while looming over him with his crown of bones, “My Angel.”

Angel is spread too wide, too deep. The last three shoves topple him over the edge. Angel comes all over their torsos. He faintly registers cheers, but even those are muted. Alastor keeps thrusting into him. The explosion near the end of his climax takes him off guard. He’s unsure how Alastor performs the spell, but the mind-altering pleasure is drawn out for an unorthodox length of time. It’s bone-tingling, it’s euphoria, and it spirals on forever.

Peering through the pink cloud, Angel registers Alastor’s thrusts stuttering in a more turbulent pattern. He thickens inside of Angel, and the other phantom cocks follow suit. Angel, still swimming in excruciating pleasure, moans as he’s filled, undeniably and utterly. He obediently swallows the warmth flooding his mouth, and accepts the copious amount of come coating his insides. As soon as he does so, the phantom cocks withdraw. Alastor remains inside.

Finally, he starts to float back down from the high. It still lingers on the perimeter, but it feels much more manageable. That is until Alastor opens his mouth.

“My dears, I think I’ve found my mate, for the second time in this unholy life. I’ll keep this one, perchance, if he doesn’t slip away again.”

Angel floats back up.

“I’ll have the Book readied and gussied up. Make sure he reads it and understands the terms,” a sensible voice suggests.

“Oh, Alastor,” someone gushes, “your mother will be so proud.”

He hums in agreement. He leans down to lick at Angel’s ear.

“What say you, beloved?”

There’s only one possible way to answer.

He murmurs it onto Alastor’s lips.

Angel has traversed the world, ghosts nipping at his heels. Angel has traversed the world, but he left his heart back here, in this dusty, sleepy town with the boy he never forgot.

How could he?

Alastor, pleased and having preternaturally overcome his refractory period, resumes thrusting as his cock thickens again. He lets loose an unnatural growl, and Angel sighs.

Overstimulated and weak, Angel grants Alastor use of his body. He doesn’t surrender, not yet, because what fun would it be if he did so prematurely?

Alastor laughs lowly from the shade of dappled leaves and dying light. He kisses Angel with such obeisance that it feels entirely mocking.

“Astute, my dear. Let’s not give the plot away too soon.”

He kisses him, again, then travels his lips down to his throat. He savagely bites down. Angel gasps, too loud for these still woods.

“In the interim, let’s see how far you can stretch.”

The flames from the pyres continue to rise and billow throughout the long, dense night.

(Don’t be fooled)

This is a love story that has been years in the making, they both think, all at once, in unison.

It echoes, a deafening, macabre hymn.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title is from the song, Season of the Witch, by Donovan.
> 
> Chapter title is from the song, Full Moon Tonight, by Silvastone feat. Bellsaint.
> 
> 1\. I probably won’t make the Angst/Comfort deadline by Wednesday so I’m aiming for next week. I will make the other two deadlines, come hell or high water.
> 
> 2\. The second chapter caused my cold dead heart to hurt writing it, take that as you will
> 
> 3\. Thank you so damn much for reading, all of you.


	2. They Call The Rising Sun

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The added tags go into effect in the next chapter as there is very little smut in this one.

First, two things:

One. Angel never really reads the Book. He skims through it because reading was never his forte. Growing up, the words switched around and jumbled up in his head, so he relied on Alastor to read aloud to him when he was in the mood for a good story. Angel became skilled at imagining, and Alastor, orating.

Because Angel never really reads the Book, he misses the essential clause, among other things: a statement that proclaims that he needs to sign the back in blood in order to be bound in unholy matrimony as Alastor’s mate. It also states something else that he scans over, and unfortunately for him, the devil was in the details.

Two. Alastor is unaware that Angel has never really read the Book.

Because Angel never really reads the Book, Alastor waits patiently for two years.

He starts to fray by the third.

(See, for all the mind-reading and magic in the world, there will always be mundane wrenches like poor communication, translation errors, and the belief that love must scald in order for it to be love.

If magic could fix everything, there would never exist such a gnarled, twisted story, now would there?

The problem, as it always has been since the Garden, lies with man.)

* * *

The first time Angel wore his crucifix, it was solely to spite Alastor.

They were fighting about something or other that started menial, then exploded as it was bound to around them. Alastor flinched at the sight before berating him without exactly explaining the circumstances in which he found it abhorrent. Angel, mired in his savagery, hadn’t even thought to ask.

(They always fought, nowadays)

The second and last time, however, was unprecedented. He simply didn’t know how much pain the contact would cause. It never crossed his mind.

Alastor was fucking into him after hastily stripping him of his trousers, then his briefs. He handed the reins to instinct and bent Angel over after unceremoniously shoving his dick inside. Rutting with an intent to breed was apparently Alastor’s recent modus operandi, genetic sex be damned. It’s not that Angel minded much, in fact, he relished the sensations, but this particular day was a Sunday, and Angel had just arrived home from church with his mother and Molly. As Alastor tore at his dress shirt, Angel unthinkingly clasped his hand over his. He pushed it onto his bare chest, like always.

It wasn’t the first in the series of unfortunate events, but it was the impetus towards disintegration.

(Decay)

He just remembers skin, sizzling, and Alastor’s wretched howl of pain. For the first time in a long time, he bared his teeth at Angel, extricated himself from their embrace, and stalked out into the night. Angel babbled an incoherent apology, the scent of charred meat haunting his sense of smell, and rushed after him. By the time he reached the arch of the door, Alastor had vanished.

There were no visible footprints leading out into the swampy night sea. The absence of noise was palpable and unnerving, extending outwards past the thickets and beyond. The woods, dead quiet. The wind, gone.

It feels, to Angel, like a stalemate.

He hurries back inside to grab a wool blanket before returning to their rickety, peeling porch. He bundles up, burrowing his naked skin inside the husk, and waits for dawn. For Alastor.

In his confusion and guilt, Angel forgets to remove the rosary from around his neck. It rests on his sternum, the last ward against the night. It rests, defiant, a mark of derision against Alastor and everything he stands for.

Angel succumbs to sleep.

Alastor returns later, his useless heart beating with compunction. The flight had siphoned most of the excess energy from their quarrel. The fresh kill, the rest. He stinks of entrails. The organ meats burst in his hands as he focused his destructive ardor on the body in front of him.

(And not on the body he left behind, in their ramshackle home)

He walks towards his sleeping angel, lifts his hand, but stops short.

Angel, in his confusion and guilt, forgot to remove the crucifix from his neck. Angel, when he awakes, will know this.

Alastor, in the present, does not.

The acrid stench of iron woven into the intermetallic compounds wafts under his nose in admonition. Betrayal, he thinks, as the moths bat their bodies, self-immolating, into the torchlights. It stabs him, the hot blade of it, as he looks down at his slumbering lover.

All he sees is someone who will betray him like his father betrayed his mother and how his grandmother betrayed his grandfather. And on and on it goes.

Angel has finally done it.

He’s rejected Alastor, his core, the mating marks, _everything_. He wants to believe that Angel agreed to become his mate by his own volition and without coercion, but the self-loathing part of Alastor rises to the surface like smoke in a burning house. Alastor has always been pragmatic. Sensible, even in his dogmatic world.

His mind works like this: years ago, Angel left. Alastor does not know why. They quarrel almost every day. There’s only one common denominator that he can see.

It must be because of him.

(It’s pure sophistry, but keep in mind, Alastor, as infallible as he thinks he is, is running high on emotions right now. It’s Angel, after all)

Something pulses feebly under knots of scar tissue. The grip is tight, too tight, and Alastor’s chest cracks open with the force of it.

There’s a rumor among his kind that speaks of ineffable spells that a powerful witch can subconsciously cast. Alastor doesn’t know if the tales rest on insubstantial hearsay but he is also unsure of how powerful he is. He comes to the conclusion that perhaps he may have inadvertently forced his lover into a relationship that he did not wholeheartedly want.

He hangs his head as he makes up his mind.

(Like surrendering to an inevitable noose)

He enters their cabin, squirreling away the essentials before stepping back out into the cool damp air.

After hazarding a final glance at Angel, snapping a last image as a gift to himself, he leaves.

The forest debris swirl at the crackling frissons of magic and despair (a melancholic magic unto itself).

He leaves before Angel can.

He leaves before what’s left of his heart breaks all over again.

How does it feel, he thinks as he takes flight.

His heart, buried under mounds of keloidal scar tissue, flutters again, infirm.

(It feels like this)

* * *

Seasons come and go. Change is inevitable.

The Greek philosopher, Heraclitus, rightly stated that the only constant in life is change.

What then, of love?

Is it as inconsistent as all that? Does it ebb and flow, wax and wane?

These are questions that no one who walks the earth has the answers to.

It’s been rumored that the witches ask the trees.

It is unknown if the trees answer back.

* * *

Angel wants to hit him, so bad. He knows Alastor registers this: he sees it in his eyes, if not in the inner recesses of his mind. Alastor’s eyes slit and he stalks up to Angel, goading, so Angel slams up a picture of his father and projects it, clear and ringing and no-nonsense, into Alastor’s barbed mind.

Alastor stops. He scowls.

To anyone else, the expression appears foreign. Alastor smiles constantly, convincing the plebeians that he is above weakness, above any emotion other than mocking laughter. He affords the hoi polloi only an outward glimpse into his mad psyche.

To anyone except for Angel, he is convincing.

“Two years,” Angel snarls. “Two fuckin’ years.”

Alastor says nothing, an anomaly. He doesn’t look the least bit affected. Just cold and callous as he was wont to be.

(Just not with Angel, never this way with Angel)

“Two goddamn, fuckin’”- _lonely_ , he doesn’t say-“years, Al.”

“I’m well aware,” he smoothly interjects. “I am familiar with basic arithmetic. And the passage of time.”

Angel bridles. The anger threatens to flood him.

For two long years, Angel searched endlessly for his peripatetic lover. High and low, he hunted. He tuned in, switching on their radio every night, hoping to snag a tendril of Alastor’s mellifluous voice on his show, to no avail. The line flickered, just static and dead air.

It was as if his beastly lover disappeared from the face of the earth. It was as if night swallowed him up in an act of unmitigated vore.

His soul cried out as he dissolved into a strange sickness, a malady of madness that stretched resolutely on like the endless forest beyond the clearing.

Two years’ worth, thought Angel bitterly, caustic with rage and pain. Two years of celibacy. Two years of convalescence that amounted to nothing. Two years of pining and waiting and searching, while Alastor was here, all this time, skirting the edges along his vision.

Deliberately avoiding Angel.

The thought is a lance to his heart.

Alastor left, just as Angel did all those years ago.

And he never intended to return.

He chokes around the clots of pain. His foundation is crumbling. Angel is starting to believe that everything he thought he meant to Alastor was built upon revenge and spite.

_Foolish_ , Alastor’s mordant voice rings inside his head. _Why waste my formative years on someone that I didn’t care for?_

_Am I truly that reprehensible to you?_

It’s laden with misery, layered with malignant sorrow.

Somehow, it hurts him more, the remorse and absence of endearments.

Yet another twist of the knife.

Angel recoups as he’s viciously reminded of the reason he’s followed Alastor, to this square. It happened weeks ago, and he cannot scrub it from his mind.

It won’t even scab over.

“Who’s your-”

He stops. His heart lodges in the intermediary space between two of his ribs. He can’t say it. The words are wedged within his throat.

It’s agony.

(Who is your mate now)

Alastor watches Angel fall apart with equanimity. All those early years spent aching for Alastor, attempting to replace his profane touch with countless others only to deem it irreplaceable and now this. The tables have turned, and Angel feels like retching.

Alastor says, “That’s none of your concern” so matter-of-fact and divorced from any emotion that it’s a near thing.

Angel dry heaves. Alastor moves on instinct towards him but Angel holds out a hand.

“Fuck. You,” he whispers through strangled breaths.

Alastor steps back obediently.

He has the audacity to look ashamed.

* * *

There’s a man named Raleigh that Angel finds Alastor has been courting. He’s five years younger than they are which places his age at around twenty-two or twenty-three. Raleigh is pretty, docile, and shy. Angel is pretty too, but the similarities end there.

Angel despises him.

Angel hates him, more than anything in this wretched life. He hates him more than his abusive father, more than his older brother’s ironclad convictions, more than Molly’s absolute surrender.

Angel hates him more than he hates Alastor, and himself.

(That’s quite a bit of hate)

He discovered them once, in a clearing about five miles west of here.

Angel had finished checking out books, occult and the like, at the tiny library in the center of town. He rushed out, almost dropping the grimoire. Miss Laveau recovered both the book and his composure as she passed him, and Angel nodded in deference. She met his greeting with one of her own, but for a split second, she looked sad.

The moment passed them by as they glided past each other, two ships.

He missed her almost as much as Alastor. She treated him more like a son than his father ever did. There were nights that he’d turn up at their doorstep, black and blue, and she’d bundle him up with one of her quilts steeped in the scents of vervain and chamomile. She and Alastor would light another candle for him to place at their hearth. For a blessed few weeks after that, his father curbed his drinking.

He fought back a miserable tide as he walked back to their truck when he felt a familiar prickling in the autumn air. Barricading himself inside, he drove to where it felt most potent, which led him to the outskirts of town. He parked the car and killed the ignition.

A chorus of chanting, held aloft in October air.

By chance, he followed the trilling in the forest to where it diverged: in the forked loop among the trees. He came upon them, vision clouded like a nictitating membrane likely due to the foliage of magic, intertwined like lovers.

(Like mates)

His heart shattered in innumerable pieces as he watched the love of his life lazily push into the other man who was straddling his hips. Together, they moved in unison with the rhythm of the coven’s chanting. Alastor stiffened as he came inside the man who wasn’t Angel with a snarl. He looked just as Angel remembered him: the first time and the last.

Angel turned away, blinded by tears.

What he didn’t see was the lack of tenderness etched in Alastor’s face. He didn’t see the way he slumped, not in relief, but something resembling defeat.

Call it a trick of the light: the horns above his head looked less like boughs and more like weeds.

Angel staggered home, back to the cabin that they had once shared. He folded into their bed, subconsciously leaving the left side empty to curl into himself on the right.

Cliché, like all things, but Angel wept himself to sleep, collapsed in on himself, less fetal and more clipped marionette.

The crucifix has since been removed from his person, ever since that night. To be honest, Angel has never needed it since meeting and loving Alastor. Their love was protection enough, he knows, a little too late.

It hangs above the door in the entranceway in remembrance, in penance, for Angel’s transgressions.

He will never forget, nor forgive himself.

* * *

“Why must you pursue me,” Alastor says as if he doesn’t already know.

Angel is tired.

He’s weary, enough so that he doesn’t try to stop the deluge of words that rush out of his mouth.

“Because you run from me.”

You did first, Alastor again doesn’t say.

It hangs between them, like swinging bodies.

Like crucifixes affixed to doorways.

* * *

He wants to love Raleigh, he really does. He’s everything that Alastor should covet in an ideal mate. Raleigh is the son of high priestess Anaica from the Southern Coven. His father was another notable witch from a smaller but no less prestigious tribe.

Alastor is just another half-breed that clings to the coattails of his well-bred, powerful mother who abandoned all hope to abscond with his father, a mere, ordinary mortal from overseas.

Or so they say.

Alastor was never one for heeding unsubstantiated gossip. He knows he is more powerful than the lot of them combined. His brand of raw power, unprecedented by any living mortal soul, is well known throughout all the covens. The ones that matter, anyway.

He is well on his way to becoming one of the highest, most lauded, coven leaders in the history of witchery, which makes the selection of mates of utmost importance.

After the disaster that was Angel, he chose Raleigh.

(A second-rate substitute)

Raleigh is patient with him. He’s studious and kind. He makes these delightful noises when they fuck that remind him of-

_No._

He accommodates Alastor’s flights of fancy and flamboyant moods, all too well. There’s no pushback; none. Alastor finds himself oddly craving resistance before banishing the inane thought. Dominion is raison d'être for all coven leaders. A docile and subdued mate was treasured above all and praised with the highest regard. Next to no one desired a spitfire, wildcard one.

He laughs weakly.

Next to no one, he reminds himself, but not in firm admonishment as he ought to.

Did you know:

Alastor came back, once.

Six months had passed since he left, since Angel flouted his family’s credo and rejected Alastor’s courtship. Angel still lived in the ramshackle cabin they had once called their own. He missed Angel terribly, and in his flight of fancy, he envisioned reconciling their love amidst the violence in his heart.

He couldn’t go past the door.

Angel, in all his apparent anathema towards Alastor, nailed the metal crucifix above the door, barring him from entering, and banishing him out, forevermore.

The cabin no longer belonged to them.

It belonged to Angel, and Alastor was never to be allowed in.

He did a curious thing then.

Alastor wept.

He wept and he raged until finally, he went stock still.

Tomorrow, he told himself. Tomorrow he’ll entertain the options laid out by his mother for his potential, _official_ mate. Llŷr, Raleigh, Ariadne. One of them will do, he supposed.

(That just won’t do)

No use crying over spilled blood, after all.

He left emptier than he arrived.

* * *

“Because you run from me,” Angel says with conviction.

His voice dips lower, deadlier.

“Now tell me: who is he?”

Alastor reiterates his earlier answer, but Angel refuses to kowtow.

“Fuck you, Al. I fuckin’ saw you together! Ain’t ya hurt me enough?”

As expected, Alastor turns the tables with record speed.

“Hurt? Oh, Angel, what a jocular jest. Let me remind you of who exactly abandoned who.”

There it is, that viper. Angel closes his eyes and waits for the death knell.

He isn’t disappointed.

“That man at the bar in Budapest. Did he matter? The men in Vienna. The one in San Tropez. Portland. San Francisco. Honolulu. Seoul. Osaka.”

The hitch in his spiel between Honolulu and Seoul is the only indication that he’s affected. Angel has loved him for so long, the signs are more than telltale.

“Shall I keep going or?”

Alastor seems borderline apoplectic.

Angel lashes out with shame and humiliation, dual flames sparking in his belly.

He left their sad, rickety town because he was afraid.

He was afraid of what Alastor meant to him, what he means to him. He left to sow his imaginary, idealized oats that never came to fruition. He left because Alastor forced him to feel things beyond the books, beyond the romantic stories read aloud to him. He urged and nagged at him to see love for what it is, ugly and feckless and maybe ephemeral, but ever-present. Written between, woven within, all threaded messily outside the lines.

Angel left because he was afraid.

He was afraid that Alastor was the be-all, end-all for Angel. Angel left because he lacked faith.

He was wrong. Wrong in regards to the latter, right about the former.

“Sure, Al, go ‘head. Keep fuckin’ truckin’ along. Remind me of all the guys I fucked tryin’ to forget you. Keep tellin’ me what a fuckin’ whore I am.”

He tears at the admission.

(Not at the word, “whore”, mind you. It’s what he did to try and forget him)

“Whore? What an antiquated and archaic notion. It matters not to me how many partners you’ve entertained,” Alastor hisses.

“Then what the fuck is it,” Angel says, already predicting the answer.

“It’s the fact that they weren’t me.”

Alastor steps forward. He looks abashed, almost. He sighs and sinks his head down on Angel’s shoulder. Angel’s heart jolts as his breath tickles his collarbone. Alastor noses against his jaw.

He can’t help it at this point. It’s habit.

It always has been.

Bite down, Angel pleads. Please bite down.

And:

Make me yours again.

Please.

Alastor answers, one for sorrow.

(Like the magpie nursery rhyme)

_I’m sorry._

_I can’t do this anymore._

“Can’t? Or won’t?” Angel’s voice breaks but he’s beyond redemption now.

“Both,” Alastor says. He seems sad.

He looks sad.

He turns away again on that dusty, dying floor they know as the earth. Angel is about to watch the boy who became a man who was always the love of his life walk away and he _can’t_ stand it, he _won’t_.

Something flares, sparks, and catches fire. It travels from the junction at his throat and bursts in flames down his spine, skipping past every other vertebrae.

Alastor pauses.

No _._

He _stops_.

Angel’s legs carry him to where Alastor has halted. He moves on autopilot as he approaches him. Angel wraps his arms around Alastor’s torso and presses his forehead and nose to his broad back.

No words are necessary.

Alastor’s back rises with life and falls away with breath. He is the shadows in the shade of trees, the wind darting through the boughs and whistling on stormy nights, the staircase in the middle of the woods. He is the howling in the trees, the lean, ferine slashes embedded in faceless billboards, and the gleaming teeth on moonless nights.

Alastor is twenty-eight years old and ageless. He is of Haitian, Choctaw, and French descent. He is the leader of his coven. And when he grew up, in the woods not far from here, he befriended a boy named Anthony.

He is Alastor.

He is Alastor, and he is Angel’s.

Anthony’s.

Angel could never be rid of Alastor. He was just a part of him like the earthy scent that clung to his clothes, the lifelines embedded in his palms, the unorthodox sexuality that coursed through his veins.

Please, Angel says.

Stay.

(“I love you” does not need to be uttered.

They know)

Angel’s lips let out a sigh when Alastor finally closes his hands around Angel’s arms.

His aberrant, dicrotic heart falls back into rhythm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Chapter title are lyrics from the song, House of the Rising Sun, originally by The Animals, but Lauren O’Connell’s version is magic.
> 
> 2\. RadioDust week Day 2: Angst/ ~~Comfort~~
> 
> 3\. Iron is said to be anathema to fae and witches. Crucifixes, at least in this story, add another layer to that.
> 
> 4\. "One for Sorrow" is a nursery rhyme about magpies. The number of how many one sees determines their luck, or lack thereof.


	3. Strange Magic

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Please heed the tags, especially the sexual and blasphemous ones.

Angel reintroduces himself to Alastor’s body.

Tears dew on his lashes he mounts him, a facsimile of the lovemaking he witnessed earlier in the clearing as his heart was breaking. He winces as Alastor enters him. Angel sinks down with only the pain to guide him. Alastor murmurs a spell, _damn him_ , and the sting disappears.

 _It wasn’t that_ , Alastor whispers in his head. _It wasn’t love._

_It isn’t._

Angel hitches his hips up and down, hissing in pleasure at the familiar shape, size, thickness. It feels stupid, he thinks, but he’s back where he belongs. The thought makes him choke with outpouring sentiment. Alastor rubs his back throughout the break.

They’re both fucking, not for the release or the completion. They’re fucking just for the nearness, the unutterable glide of skin on skin.

He missed him so much

 _I missed you so much_

The words overlap, in unison.

(Just like their bodies)

* * *

It’s an egregious error.

Angel didn’t read the Book. He merely skimmed it.

Apparently, a signature was required.

Alastor is _incandescent_.

“What I’m having trouble comprehending is how your utter disregard and lack of _focus_ led to _-_ ”

“Finish that fuckin’ sentence, Al, and we are goin’ to have more problems than miscommunication, I guarantee that.”

Angel pulls the covers up to his chest.

Their cabin is warmer now after they lit the hearth and stoked it with the dried skeletal remains of felled trees. It still doesn’t quite chase away the chill of autumn air or the night breeze buffeting the glass windows. Alas, their combined tempers more than make up for the lack of heat.

Alastor attempts to corral his, and Angel barely holds back his battering ram.

Hours ago, they stumbled back to their old cabin, where Angel currently resided, alone. They kissed clumsily and groped each other through flannel shirts and thick jeans, making up for lost time. As they fumbled on their porch, Angel opened their door with his key, beckoning for Alastor to enter, but Alastor stayed his hand.

Angel was confused until Alastor gestured, heavenward, to the hanging crucifix.

Alastor projected his memories from the last time he approached their doorstep, six months after their fight. Six months from when he left. The miasma of iron and the serrated jaws of despair rooted him to the spot. Rejection scorched him, a smoking brand in his mind.

Angel collapsed under the weight of realization, and would not be consoled for an hour.

He cried until he was wrung dry. Alastor held him, silently shaking.

They began to wonder what other follies they committed under the heady spell of infatuation.

Which then, brings it back to the Book that Angel didn’t read.

(All of this could have been avoided under the right circumstances. However, this is their imperfect, mangled life, and there lies no convenient Deux ex Machina to rescue them from their fate. This is what happens when two very opposite people try to tempt it)

There was a clause that Angel was meant to read. An essential clause that kept Alastor waiting for almost three years. A clause that stated that if, after thirty-six months, he persisted in clinging to any faith besides the coven’s, he rejects the offer and claim of mate.

Note that nothing under coven laws state that speaking of these clauses and signatures were taboo, or verboten. Alastor just assumed that Angel would read the damned thing, and his silly pride muzzled him from inquiring about it.

So yes, one would say that they both missed the mark, catastrophically.

“So you didn’t-”

Alastor bites out, “You thought that I would even consider severing our bond, had we consummated it?”

He laughs, bitter and low. “How much faith do you have in me, if any at all?”

The question is tinged with some anger, but mostly ancient sadness.

Angel reaches out and cradles his face.

There is a snapshot from long ago:

His tongue tingled in the aftermath. The pain was secondary, due to the endorphins dancing in his blood. The steel was foreign to him. He experimentally pushed the barbell against his teeth so that the stud protruded from his tongue.

Alastor, his changeling lover, had threaded the barbell inside layers of thick tissue after using the sharpest, mid-gauge needle to pierce through the unyielding pound of flesh.

Angel, in turn, pierced Alastor’s ear lobe with the same needle after Alastor hummed a spell to sanitize it. Angel recovered from the incident, reveling at Alastor’s hiss of pain as he did so. Angel wasn’t a sadist; he just craved wayward reminders of the human parts of Alastor’s soul. The ones he could understand.

(“ _We will make you earrings of gold, studded with silver”_ )

Right, he thought. Right for Alastor’s bad eye, right for creativity.

Right, for Angel’s kind, but he doesn’t tell Alastor that out loud.

Right for what Alastor isn’t exactly, but for what Angel explicitly is.

(Alastor knows all about the purpose behind the placement. He just lets Angel have this one)

* * *

“You asked me earlier who my mate is now.”

Alastor closes his eyes, lashes fluttering shut. He presses the first of many kisses to Angel’s tear-tracked face. His lips leave and return, wet, but he doesn’t cease. He once told Angel that his freckles were one of his favorite things about him.

(There’s an old family legend tucked away somewhere, that speaks of freckles as eyes to another world. It’s a story about a spider god, but much too lengthy to recite now)

Angel sobs quietly. He doesn’t want to know. Ignorance is bliss, he thinks. Ignorance is strength. Blessed are the forgetful.

“Who,” he rasps out, partially against his will. He does not want to know, but he needs to.

He cannot bear to see who Alastor has replaced him with, but it’s essential if he needs to move on.

Moving on, Angel thinks. What a fallacy. He’s been eschewing real life for Alastor from the beginning. Moving on, at this juncture, means death. And even then, the one remaining will follow the other down.

Alastor projects again, and all the images come tumbling in at once.

 _Snap._ Angel, dancing beside their wood-burning stovetop as the pot bubbles over, to the beat of his own drum.

 _Snap._ Angel, sleepily whimpering and grasping out in his sleep as Alastor reluctantly disengages from the warmth of their embrace to ready for his early morning radio show.

 _Snap._ Angel, spinning with arms outstretched in the cold light of dawn, feet wet with dew and caked with mud, smiling up at the endless pinks and gold.

 _Snap._ Angel, moaning as he thrusts up into Alastor, their positions switched even though he prefers it the other way, just because Alastor wants him to know how it feels, to be inside the one you need, and never wanting to leave.

 _Snap._ Angel, writhing beneath him, as Alastor claims him, as the border of late afternoon transforms into night.

 _Snap._ Angel, again.

And again, and again, and again.

 _Ad infinitum_.

They pour through his mind, all the portraits, moving images, and stills of Angel until they overflow. A wave of relief, so large that all he can see of the crest are hills of white water, rushes and swallows him whole. As he’s battered by the current, his breath momentarily stolen under raging surf, Alastor’s voice reaches him.

_Angel._

_Anthony._

_It has always been you._

_How could you have been so foolish to not have known that?_

“It has always been you, for me.”

Angel fractures at the confession.

It’s not a clean break, but it’s dead close, and Alastor leans in, keen on repairing it.

Angel welcomes it.

Him.

* * *

(Let’s start at the ~~very~~ _new_ beginning, a very good place to start)

“The same one that rejected you the last two times? Alastor dear, are you sure you’re not secretly a masochist?”

“Shush, Rosie. Don’t antagonize him. Third time’s the charm, after all.”

“Third time lucky, to be sure. He _is_ pretty, but the other one was younger.”

“Youth matters not a lick. This one is far more supple and comely.”

Angel shuts his eyes against the onslaught of remarks. There are more of them now: some men, mostly women, and some in-between. The smoke from the lit effigies and the crackling of embers replace the augural vision of the forest and all those prying eyes. Alastor noses his wet cheek, trailing soft kisses from his jaw to his lower lashes.

“Don’t mind them, Anthony, beloved,” he croons on his cheek. “After all, the world is a stage, and the stage is a world of entertainment.”

He licks up Angel’s ear.

“Focus on me, all the same.”

He chuckles in that half-mad way of his, and Angel parts his lips, releasing a breathy moan. He’s deranged, they all are in some way or another, but he cannot imagine being under anyone else, ever.

* * *

“Tell me you don’t want this,” he snarls, pressing his bulbous head onto Angel’s thigh and smearing precum on his skin.

“Tell me you don’t want this, and I will restrain myself.”

Angel glares up at him, eyes alight with fire.

“Fuck. You,” he says, reaching down to wrap his fingers around the base of Alastor’s cock. Alastor curses, a wicked stream of spells casting from his bitten mouth. As Angel guides his cock to his entrance, tendrils snake out to paw at him. One fastens itself around the base of his own cock, while the other teases his slit. Another phantom appendage spreads his hole wider for its master.

“Don’t ya dare stop,” he threatens. Alastor’s smile widens.

“Oh, love. Had I enough willpower to,” he purrs before his cockhead pries Angel open.

It burns in the most delicious way. Angel feels full, he feels sated, and _finally_.

He almost weeps in absolution.

 _Do you remember the first time I conquered you_ , Alastor hisses in his mind.

 _You were so eager for me, so pliant_ , he laughs.

Angel is tempted to spit. He bristles with indignation but his body speaks otherwise.

He tightens in response. Alastor gasps as Angel bears down in petulance.

“You may try that again,” Angel says with faux benevolence.

Alastor nips at his neck, sharper and much more jagged than the distant last time.

“May I speak, now?” he hisses, unhinged.

Angel loosens his tongue.

“You may.”

Alastor thrusts inside him, and Angel answers. His prostate is assaulted by Alastor’s invasion. He begs in few words what physical pleasure imparts. The whispers converge as his pleasure builds.

There’s always an ebb and flow. It’s how it withstands the storms that threaten to overwhelm them.

He grins, all teeth.

Alastor shudders as he spills inside for the first time, this time. His hips stutter while he shivers with his seminal release, and Angel moans in frustration as the ring around the base of his cock tightens, trapping him from coming. Alastor’s cock expands inside him, pushing against the nerves. Devilish, he brings a hand down and splays it right above Angel’s cock, pressing down on the smooth skin and stimulating his prostate from the outside. Angel’s dick twitches in response, and he moans, canting up to an invisible mouth.

The main spell takes hold, and Alastor resumes his assault. Sweat beads upon his brow as he rocks into Angel again, determined. The air is punched out of Angel’s lungs as his lover fucks into him, come lubricating the way with shameful, squelching sounds. Angel parts his legs wider at the familiar twisted burn of humiliation and arousal. It’s second nature to the beast, at this point. His cock bobs almost uselessly as Alastor manipulates his body.

 _Oh_.

A wicked, base thought travels through his mind.

He grabs hold of Alastor’s wrist, the one pressing down on his stomach, and forces it in further.

“Change me, Al. I’ll let ya.”

Alastor knows what he means. This isn’t their first time, by far. He halts, still embedded deep within, breathing erratically.

“Why would I do that?” he pants out, cock pulsing under the spell’s influence.

“So we can…”

Angel pauses. He’s frighteningly aware of the attention, but he’s gotten past the point of caring.

 _You’re more than a vessel, you know. I’m not altering you more than need be unless you explicitly ask for it_.

_You’re not a broodmare, darling._

“Tell me the truth, Alastor.”

His hips hitch as he goads Alastor back into moving.

“Were ya ever going to breed him?”

He hates the way his voice sounds, so petulant and childish. In recompense, he grinds down harder around his lover. Alastor sucks in a harsh breath.

“He…asked for it, specifically, yes. But you know that I won’t jump-”

Angel curses, then yanks Alastor’s hand up to his chest. He arches his back, pushing his nipple up under his palm, and bites back a moan as Alastor kneads at the flat smoothness. He thumbs at his nipple, circling and flicking the bud before drawing nails down on it.

Do it, Angel says to him, from deep within. Just the top, then. Later, when we’re alone, I want to milk you with my cunt.

Alastor sighs in submission. He casts the spell.

The flat surface of Angel’s chest tingles as his breasts slowly start to mound. He hears titters of excitement as his breasts form under Alastor’s waiting palms, growing larger and shapelier. When they reach sufficient size, he grabs Alastor’s hands and pushes them up as they cup his tits, so that he can feel the sensation of overflow. His nipples pebble under Alastor’s ministrations, and Angel sighs in pleasure at the sensitivity and the extra weight. Alastor breathes unsteadily through his nostrils. Angel smirks.

He will never admit how much he enjoys this, Angel thinks.

_Never say never, darling._

Alastor dips his crown of bones down and latches on to a nipple. He greedily laves his tongue around it, sucking lightly, then biting down. Flashes of fire rake down Angel’s spine. Precum pearls at his slit as he curses Alastor for the umpteenth time about the vice grip around the base of his cock. Alastor paws at the newly formed flesh, jiggling them in rapt fascination.

“Those are going to look so lovely, darling, when I claim you.”

Angel thinks his mind implodes, thanks to all the images that Alastor sends out: Alastor’s cock cradled between his tits; thick white come sliding down his breasts; tits bouncing as Alastor fucks into his cunt while Alastor circles his clitoris.

A tear rolls down his cheek. He wants to come, so badly.

“Apologies, dear. Last one before the main event.”

Alastor picks up the pace. The insistent rocking motion fills Angel in places he swears no one has ever touched him before. He thinks that maybe it’s magic when his prostate is rubbed, and Alastor laughs in his head.

It’s layered with arousal and base need, but Angel pouts, regardless.

As best as he can, anyway.

The invisible ring choking his cock flutters, the telltale sign that the spell is about to break. Alastor thrusts erratically as he reaches his second peak. He freefalls as he fucks his release into Angel, copious amounts of come lubing the way. Angel gasps as his ass is filled again, the impossible girth adding pain and pleasure to his admittedly overwrought reserves. Alastor blessedly pauses for a moment, catching his breath as he rests inside Angel. The low murmuring picks up again around them, and he hardens again. Angel whimpers as Alastor rocks into him, once more.

_Rule of three._

Angel wonders if it’s possible to be fucked to death as Alastor adjusts his angle and lifts Angel’s ankle to place it over his shoulder. His breasts heave with every thrust. Alastor whispers a demand inside his head, and when ignored, vocalizes it for the rest of the coven.

“Touch them, Angel. Lest the magic goes to waste.”

Before he can obey, he feels twin pools of suction around his nipples. The ghostly replicas of mouths lick and suck at his tits. Angel cups his hands under his breasts, displaying them for Alastor. He bites his lip, drawing blood. The scent drives Alastor into a frenzy. The cock ring expands as Alastor speeds up his thrusts, rutting right up against his prostate.

Mind spinning with overstimulation, he almost misses the seductive allure of magic that switches Alastor’s attention from him.

Arms snake around Alastor’s naked torso as he halts his movements. Giggles burst from the crowd, taking flight in the charged air.

Angel bares his teeth, furious. The asshole in question sidles closer to Alastor, their faces too close for Angel’s liking or comfort. Angel snarls and kicks out at him, impaled as he is on Alastor’s cock. Alastor moans at the jostling. Just like that, the trance is broken. Raleigh steps away, cowed and beaten.

A flash of emotion sluices across his face that Angel knows all too well. He’s familiar with it, and so is Alastor. It’s the ache that accompanies loss. It is the heart-rendering pain of devastation.

For a second, Angel commiserates. He understands what it’s like to lose Alastor, his love. But it dissipates like steam. Alastor was never not Angel’s, and so this man can never understand the extent of Angel’s ache, the one fathoms deep.

“Touch him again and it’ll be the last fuckin’ thing ya ever do,” he promises, to the would-be usurper.

He’s answered by the barest of head nods, but Angel still pulls Alastor down with him by the nape.

“Fuck me, Al. Show everyone how much I mean to ya.”

“How much you love me.”

Why everyone assumes the receiver is the one relinquishing power is beyond him. Angel knows who holds the reins. Alastor is his conduit, in this heinous here and now.

Angel is the conductor.

Of course his beloved complies.

What arouses Alastor the most, besides the blood and the sex and the come, is explicit consent. Consent is magic, unto itself. Witches, unsurprisingly, demand it in this particular ritual. Alastor loves that Angel consents utterly.

He always has.

Alastor growls, a terrible creaking thing, and he scrabbles at the backs of Angel’s thighs, shoving them up towards his chest. He pulls out, leaving the head of his cock inside, rutting and circling for a beat or so. Angel begs him, incoherent. He locks gazes with Alastor.

The beast looks back.

Alastor shoves inside with a singular, gut-wrenching thrust. His antlers bough outwards, splintering into a thousand sharpened prongs. The onlookers gasp in delight and amazement. The magic surrounding Angel’s cock vanishes.

Alastor bites down, copper and pennies and teeth.

Angel’s body, like the witches before him, lights on fire.

* * *

Angel is transported back as his mind frees itself from its earthly confines.

Alastor is here, in this in-between space.

He speaks.

_But that night, the night when we reconciled, darling. I couldn’t complete it._

(The mating mark, before the consent and signature of the other party)

Why, Angel asks.

_You were too far gone to properly consent._

It was true. Angel remembers overwhelming pleasure at the end and not much else.

 _And_ , Alastor continues, _I wanted you to be, above all things, sure. To come to me out of your own volition._

Oh, Angel breathes.

There was never any doubt about that.

* * *

Alastor finally extricates himself, freeing his cock from Angel’s body. The humiliating sound of it causes Angel to close his eyes, and he clenches around the dribble of come leaking from his hole. He reaches down to hide his gaping shame, but Alastor stops him.

Angel opens his eyes. They widen in shock as Alastor dips his head down and laps the spend from his hole. He cleans out his come while Angel writhes under the tongue lashings.

 _This rather does defeat the purpose of the whole ritual_ , comes Alastor’s cursed lilt.

_What, with the intent to breed and all._

Shut the fuck up, Angel projects as he builds up to his second peak, mostly in part to Alastor’s wicked attention. Alastor blessedly does.

He focuses on cleaning out Angel’s hole while simultaneously probing him with a tendril and never letting up at all on his newly formed breasts. His antlers are so close, within grabbing distance, and even through the blinding pleasure, Angel reaches out.

His fingers meet the osseous tips, and Angel grabs hold, yanking Alastor down, manipulating his horns to force his tongue deeper inside him.

Alastor growls and moans around his rim. His eyes flutter shut at Angel’s touch. It is a convincing lure, but it lasts no more than seconds. His eyes open and flash. He shakes his antlers loose, bounds up, and _shoves_ back inside.

Onlookers gasp at his temerity.

_Four._

Angel gapes at the intrusion but moves in synchrony with his lover. Alastor pistons madly, chasing release, while Angel’s builds to a fever pitch. Angel is peaking, and his mind is slowly slipping into madness, into nothing but blank space. His toes curl as the pleasure sprints through him and then he’s spilling, boneless, onto their abdomens. He clenches through his orgasm, milking Alastor’s cock.

In his mindless, animalistic haze, Angel catches fragments of thought.

 _One for sorrow, two for mirth_ , he hears, not for prying ears.

_Three for a funeral, and four for birth._

Alastor’s voice inside his head goes static, then silent as he comes inside Angel for the fourth time. It’s not a sinking feeling he experiences; rather, it’s the opposite.

Angel is buoyant, beyond mere description.

Alastor’s hips press up against Angel as he holds fast and makes damn sure his semen coats his lover’s insides. He can’t seem to catch his breath, so Angel does it for him. He brings down his love by his hair and gifts him with his mouth. Alastor robs all the oxygen out of his lungs.

What’s new, he thinks, delirious.

The musical chanting in the background sounds less like a dirge, and more like a hymn, now.

Psalms?

 _No, more like Song of Songs_ , Alastor laughs. _Or the pagan equivalent, anyway._

“Heretic” they called him, the ignorant townspeople, like the wind at his back. “Witch”, they muttered, when that wouldn’t elicit a response. “Half-breed”, the more unkind ones would say, from both sides.

What does that make him?

 _“Non serviam_ , but _:_ I am my lover’s and my lover is mine; he browses among the lilies _,”_ sings Alastor.

Angel replies, out loud, into the autumn air.

“Come away, my lover, and be like a gazelle or like a young stag on the spice-laden mountains.”

Alastor spells his mouth clean before he bends down to meet Angel properly. Angel couldn’t care less. He kisses Alastor and it’s of the purest kind: true passion.

There is nothing unclean about this.

There is no undoing what is done.

* * *

These are their woods: always and forever.

This is not to say that these woods are exclusive to them. Far from it. They existed long before Angel and his lover walked the earth, and they will continue to do so after their bones grind to dust. They will exist, timeless, as long as the earth is verdant. The trees belong to everyone, everywhere. The trees don’t discern or covet favorites.

Neither do the gods.

But these woods, Angel knows, were theirs first.

First and always.

The scent of carrion always lures them in. The offal and viscera left from the ritual lay scattered about the forest floor. Alastor seems fine with it, as always. Angel will need some time to adjust.

Alastor laughs at that.

“What are we,” he asks again.

As always, Angel receives a kiss in lieu of an answer.

The murder of crows scream their way through the trees and across and beyond.

Perhaps that is the answer. Perhaps not.

Maybe, Angel thinks, there are things in this silly world that are too brilliant, too blinding, too ineffable for explanations. Maybe there are things that exist beyond the scope of human comprehension.

Extraordinary things, like magic and monsters and humans.

Angel thinks as Alastor rests his head on his chest, breathing softly against his dappled skin in mid-day October. The trees bow and bend. They nod their assent.

Maybe love is one of them.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. Chapter title is from ELO’s song, Strange Magic
> 
> 2\. “Let’s start at the very beginning” is from the Do-Re-Mi song from Sound of Music
> 
> 3\. Re: piercing the right earlobe was, in the past, used as a symbol to indicate sexual preference, specifically, homosexuality in men.
> 
> 4\. Non serviam: Latin for “I will not serve.”
> 
> 5\. Song of Songs 1:11 “We will make you earrings of gold, studded with silver.”  
> Song of Songs 6:3 “I am my lover’s and my lover is mine; he browses among the lilies.”  
> Song of Songs 8:14 “Come away, my lover, and be like a gazelle or like a young stag on the spice-laden mountains.”


End file.
